5.22. Negotiating uneasy memory

How can different historical wrongs be remembered together? This question has been discussed in memory studies and related disciplines for a considerable time, particularly regarding the concept of “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg). However, empirically, we know little about how people respond when being confronted with different historical wrongs. This paper takes a mixed-methods approach aimed at triangulation. Relying on large-scale representative survey experiments, the study covers three countries/regions that followed markedly different paths in their memory culture and official narratives on the Holocaust as well as the engagement with colonial pasts in the post-war period: Austria, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the former German Democratic Republic. Respondents were presented with randomly varied vignettes—short texts outlining narratives of continued responsibility for the Holocaust. One groups of respondents additionally read a text on their country’s colonial past or its indirect involvement in colonialism (in the Austrian case). Subsequently, some survey respondents were also invited to participate in online focus groups to further discuss their views. Our results suggest that being exposed to information about a country’s colonial past increases support for remembering colonialism alongside the Holocaust and support for reparations – but only for the respondents whose country had a history of overseas colonialism, and for those who consider themselves to be left-wing. When being asked to reflect on the topic more deeply, participants tend to perceive colonial atrocities as further removed, at a lower level of intensity, and more “normal”, (i.e. in line with what other countries did) than the Holocaust. Overall, there is thus an openness to remember different historical wrongs (the Holocaust and colonialism) together and even some support for redistributive justice. However, the extent of this is dependent on respondents’ political views and the two events are largely perceived as qualitatively different and unrelated.

This study examines the relationship between racism and collective memory of the colonial past in the context of Japan. More specifically, it discusses how the collective forgetting of Japan’s colonial rule in Korea is connected to racism against people of Korean descent—until recently, the largest ethnic and racialized minority group in Japan. Goldberg and Solomos (2002) define racism broadly as “an expression of racially predicated or manifested social and political relations of domination, subordination, and privilege” (4). Put simply, racism refers to the expression of power relations based on the concept of race. The idea of race was elaborated and valorized in the West against the backdrop of colonialism and imperialism and intensified nationalism from the latter half of the 19th century to the end of World War II. Racism necessarily involves remembering and forgetting that past because race is “a cultural and historical, not biological, fact” (Hall 2017, 32). The two Japanese concepts of race, jinshu and minzoku, emerged under the influence of Western ideas of race between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, confronting the threat of Western imperialism, Japan transformed itself into a Western-style nation-state and imperial power by subjugating other Asian peoples. This paper first clarifies the Western and Japanese ideas of race, with particular attention to their interrelationships with colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. It then explores the conceptual links among forgetting, the nation, and racism. Finally, using a case study as a methodological approach, it examines how Japan’s collective forgetting of the colonial past relates to anti-Korean racism in recent decades. This paper argues that the notion of the Japanese as a tan’itsu (single) minzoku in which the idea of minzoku is both present (or remembered) and absent (or forgotten) plays a crucial role in anti-Korean racism.

In the long global sixties and beyond, the figure of the young Palestinian abroad was often framed through the imagery of militancy — the activist, the fighter, the hero of national struggle. Such representations, rooted in ideals of virility and sacrifice, shaped both the collective imagination and the students’ own self perceptions, as they moved between identification and distance, aspiration and everyday life. This paper foregrounds the personal and intimate memories of former Palestinian students in Italy: not only as political actors, but as young people with dreams, relationships, and trajectories of learning and self discovery. Drawing on oral testimonies and personal documents (such as diaries, letters, and photographs), it restores the everyday dimensions of these lives and reveals the human, plural character of the migratory experience. Methodologically, the research lies at the intersection of social history, microhistory, and the history of memory. It reconstructs the relational networks Palestinian students built within Italian university towns and interprets their narratives as forms of memory that interact — and sometimes clash — with the broader Palestinian collective memory. The latter, born of a need to sustain hope and cohesion in the diaspora, has often relied on the construction of myths, heroes, and emblematic moments, selecting those memories capable of reinforcing a shared national project. The paper asks: to what extent do these personal recollections diverge from, or collide with, collective memory? Do they produce gaps, silences, or subtle forms of resistance? Or do they instead give rise to recompositions and dialogues between the two levels? In this sense, to speak of memory is not only to revisit official political narratives, but to attend to the micro stories of everyday life — where history intersects with emotions, relationships, and the contradictions of individual experience.

The migration experiences stemming from the 1947 Partition, the colonial border creation event that divided the Indian subcontinent into the countries of India and Pakistan, resulted in communal violence and mass migration that shapes collective memory and identity in South Asia. The “us vs. them” divisions that arose along religious lines in 1947 came from years of buildup encouraged by colonial “divide and conquer” strategies. The resulting violence continues to shape the Indian subcontinent and diaspora today, made evident through ongoing lynchings, mob vigilantism, and political discrimination. This paper explores memories of Partition, outlining the ways collective memory continues to shape the geopolitical landscape in India and Pakistan. Further, this paper highlights counternarratives of syncretism and solidarity that exist in Partition witnesses’ personal testimonies, examining how collective memories of migration operate differently at national and personal scales. First, I examine collective memories, Partition trauma, and the weaponization of memories of trauma initially by colonial actors, then nationalist ones. Drawing from historiographical work and oral histories with Partition witnesses, I look at the ways collective memories of Partition shape current political narratives in India and Pakistan. I argue that these memories feed the cyclical violence that marks communal conflict in South Asia. Next, through analysis of twenty-five oral histories from Partition witnesses and thirteen oral histories from the children of Partition witnesses I explore memories of survival through solidarity and syncretism between religious communities. These stories of aid and resistance juxtapose the mainstream narratives of divisive communal violence in South Asia.

This paper explores the intersections of memory, history, human rights, democracy, and state-sanctioned violence, focusing on the buried history of the Marichjhapi massacre that occurred in January 1979 in West Bengal, India. Through critical textual analysis, this paper primarily analyzes Manoranjan Byapari’s chapter 14 titled “Marichjhapi” from his autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life (2018) and select oral histories from Deep Halder’s book Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre (2019), proposing a concept called “memory of excess”. By the concept of “memory of excess”, we attempt to theorize the profound silence that surrounds the experience of lower caste refugees-turned islander communities like the Namashudras, who, along with their gruesome memories, are deemed surplus to the political, social, economic, and numerical calculations of the nation-state. Their memory is not merely forgotten; it is the memory of being actively produced as a surplus and then subjected to systematic erasure. We argue that this “memory of excess” functions as both a crucial tool for understanding democratic decay and a form of resistance that insists on a more inclusive and truthful historical record. Moreover, by drawing on Foucault’s idea of biopolitics, Agamben’s concept of “homo sacer,” and Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, this paper analyzes the 1979 Marichjhapi massacre – where the state violently displaced and killed thousands of lower-caste Namashudra refugees, highlighting the role of “memory of excess” in exposing the then Government’s transition from democratic promise to the authoritarian necropolitical underside of democratic governance. Finally, by highlighting remembrances and articulations of horrifying events by the resilient marginalized groups of refugees that reveal the injustices meted out to them by the democratic government of a state, this paper reimagines the ethical dimension of memory as a practice of interrogating democratic accountability in the global postcolonial present.